


some tender charm

by words-writ-in-starlight (Gunmetal_Crown)



Category: Winternight Series - Katherine Arden
Genre: F/M, Fluff, I came up with this concept at 4 am I don't have a LOT to say for myself, Pillow Talk, Post-Canon, Shapeshifting, this may genuinely be the fluffiest thing I've ever written
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-09
Updated: 2019-09-09
Packaged: 2020-10-13 00:17:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20573315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gunmetal_Crown/pseuds/words-writ-in-starlight
Summary: Winter comes to the house at the bend of the lake at last.





	some tender charm

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes you just have to wake up from a fuzzy insomniac sleep at 4 AM, scribble down the line "Vasya kisses all of Morozko's faces," pass back out, and try to make that into a fic the next morning. So, here we are.
> 
> Title is from "Foreigner's God" by Hozier because I think I'm funny.

Winter had come to the lake at last. Vasya knew that Rus’ had long since been buried under the white blanket of snow and silence, but the bend of the lake had clung helpfully to autumn while she and the domovaya patched holes in the roof and repaired the rotted doorframe and tore out what wood could not be salvaged from the ravages of time. Much of the mildew could be forgotten away, but some was so advanced that even Vasya’s imagination could not erase its marks, and there, the wood must be replaced with new. Solovey had sailed triumphantly into Vasya’s still-open kitchen on their fourth day and declared that he had found a horse shelter, built just outside the eaves of the forest, and that, too, had needed repair. The vazila of the place was a thin ghost of himself, but Vasya fed him blood and apples and oats, and soon he warmed to her, and some of the bird-horses with him. Not all, but after the grey jay tried to bite her fingers outright and Pozhar kicked him smartly in the hindquarters with hooves that cut and left a burn in his fine pearly coat, none dared bother Vasya when she came to talk with them. She put salve on the grey jay and told Pozhar to practice patience, and was snorted at by both. It felt like progress.

Only portions of the house were mended, but enough that the kitchen was warm and the oven blazing joyously away, so that Vasya could sleep there if she needed. The domovaya, a stubborn creature who often grew shrill with alarm that Vasya might leave, had insisted on one of the other repaired rooms being a bedchamber. The old woman had grumbled, at first, but when Vasya suggested that she could instead take one of the other rooms—Tamara’s, perhaps, or Varvara’s, who could still be found to give permission—she had been turned down flat. It was unseemly, Vasya was informed loftily, for the lady of the house to sleep in any but the best rooms.

And so the old woman’s rooms were torn down to bare walls, and a new bed with furs and blankets was placed in it, and lamps that burned with a cleaner light than any Vasya had seen even in Moscow, and a wardrobe to hold clothes and a chest to hold her handful of belongings. The room was spare, the house downright sparse, but the work of repairing it was honest and hard, the kind of thing that left Vasya tired at night. It gave her desperately needed time to breathe, to relearn the limits of Vasilisa Petrovna under the cloak of the witch of the woods, to ride pell-mell into the forest and sob into Solovey’s shoulder for her brother. 

When she could not bear the weight of her thoughts, she rode so far through Midnight that she came out into the fir trees and took shelter in the little house there. It was often empty—the battle, the first in an eternity that had involved the chyerti, had caused some degree of chaos, and seeing the winter-king still riding abroad provided comfort to those who had been sorely frightened by the Bear. Vasya understood, much like he understood that she needed time to have solid walls before he came to her. It was still somewhat lonely, to sleep in the drifted white of his bed without him.

And when the thin hold of mid-autumn finally broke, Vasya slept warmly through the night.

She woke with the blurry impression that the light through her window—paned with glass that rippled and warped, but certainly warmer than being paned with ice—was too white to be the weak sun. The house seemed oddly muffled, the now-familiar creak of the roof silenced, and she could hear the domovaya muttering in the kitchen.

_Snow_, Vasya realized. It had fallen thickly overnight, as if winter, held away by her scramble to finish her work while the weather was still forgiving, had grown impatient and swept in all at once. The sky was a uniform pale grey and the wind whistled through the trees, and there was a white mare standing nose-to-nose with Pozhar, as if in deep counsel over serious matters.

Vasya scrambled out of her bed so quickly that she nearly crashed to the floor, one foot still tangled in a densely woven blanket. She splashed her face with cold water and dragged her fingers through her hair, still short enough that a brush was not, strictly speaking, necessary to put herself in good order. Plain shirt and riding trousers went over her smallclothes, then a jacket draped haphazardly over the lot, and then she was dashing out into the kitchen.

“My lady, breakfast?” the domovaya called from the oven.

“Later!” Vasya shouted as she wrestled on her boots. “It’s snowing!”

“I noticed,” the domovaya said, unamused, and added another log to the oven as Vasya ran outside.

Morozko had been waylaid by Ded Grib, who did, indeed, look rather sadly withered, and seemed to have taken it quite personally. The winter-king was observing the mushroom spirit with something very close to amusement, draped in the furs and finery of a lord in his own domain, and he turned as soon as Vasya’s boots hit the snow outside her door.

The handful of paces seemed to fly away beneath her, as if Vasya had learned to take wing like the horses she cared for, and then she was throwing herself into his arms.

“I missed you,” Vasya said, smiling up into his eyes—very blue and very bright, as he held her to him.

“You have kept me away,” Morozko replied, but he was smiling that slow, sure smile, and he brushed a wayward curl away from her eyes. “It was very impressive, to keep winter from the lake as you did.”

“How did you know that I was done with the house?”

“I have missed you as well, Snegurochka,” he said. And he was kissing her, the snow falling heavier around them as Vasya wrapped her arms around his neck. Distantly, she heard Ded Grib retreating, mumbling bitterly, into the forest, and the sound of Pozhar using her hooves to burn holes in the ice for the horses, but neither seemed to make more of an impression than the sound of each flake landing on her cheek. Vasya twined one hand into Morozko’s black hair, the other clutching the wolf-fur collar of his cloak, and he kissed her jaw, her temple, her throat, until she was laughing for pure joy and he returned to her lips with the self-satisfied air of a victor on the battlefield.

“Are you cold, my love?” Morozko asked, pulling back far enough to smile down at her, one arm tight around her waist and the other hand tracing idly up the curve of her throat.

“If I say no, will you give me a prince’s ransom?” Vasya kissed his thumb, when he rested it on her lower lip with a dry expression, and grinned at him. “If I say yes, will you freeze my heart where I stand?”

“I am quite certain that I could never freeze a heart as lively as yours,” Morozko said. He released her, and for a moment Vasya was sorry, but then his fingers were at his own throat and he was unclasping his cloak. It settled on Vasya’s shoulders heavy and thick as if it had been woven out of solid silver, the thick wolf’s fur tickling her cold cheeks and the blue cloth falling to pool at her feet. It was cool to the touch, but it held the warmth of her body beautifully, and it made her aware that, yes, she was beginning to be cold in her unseasonable clothing and open jacket.

Morozko bent and, as peremptory as he had been when she was a child freezing in a snowbank, swept her up into his arms, cloak and all. Vasya yelped, startled, and wrapped one arm around his shoulders as he chuckled at her.

“That was cheating,” Vasya said solemnly, stretching out a hand to catch snowflakes on her palm, tiny pricks of cold that melted on her skin. It was the height of winter, even here in her private kingdom, and Morozko was young and strong and full of life, and she smiled as her fingertips began to go numb. “Let us go back to the house, winter-king,” she said. “And perhaps the domovaya will give you some of the honey cakes she made.”

“As the lady wishes,” Morozko said, but he did not put her down. Instead he shook back the hair that her questing fingers had tumbled into his face and walked across the snow with Vasya secure in his arms until he reached her door, half-open from Vasya’s hasty exit.

“Mistress domovaya,” Vasya called, half-laughing still as she pushed open the door and Morozko carried her through. “Is there still breakfast? Enough for two?”

“Of course,” the domovaya said, peering out of the oven. Her familiar exasperation evaporated into plain shock, and she blinked her large coal-like eyes at Morozko as if a plain human girl-child seeing a chyert for the very first time. “Lord Frost,” she said thinly.

“This is the domovaya of the house,” Vasya told Morozko, doing her best to sound grave and polite while being held like a princess from a fairy tale. “She has done a hero’s work, helping me rebuild.”

For the first time, Morozko looked about the restored kitchen, and Vasya could see his quick blue gaze noting the places where the walls were repaired and the places where they had been replaced. Between Vasya’s magic and the domovaya’s, it looked nothing like the rotted wreck where she had taken shelter after escaping her own pyre. It was clean and neat, small but comfortably warm and home-like, sweetly scented by the domovaya’s honey cakes. The roof had not leaked in weeks and did not seem inclined to start even under the weight of the snow, the walls were square and firm, and the doorframe no longer cracked alarmingly when the door was opened too quickly. Vasya was privately of the opinion that, for a lord’s daughter who had never built a thing in her life, she had not done badly at her first try—magically assisted or not.

“It looks like somewhere well loved,” was Morozko’s judgement, and it warmed Vasya’s heart to hear it. The winter-king could make beautiful things with a twist of his hands—and loved those beautiful things—but magic could not create the feel of a place that was lived in and cared for. “Your work is very fine,” he added to the domovaya, with an elegant nod, and the domovaya only quailed a very little bit under his gaze.

“Mistress domovaya,” Vasya said, “this is the winter-king. He is my guest, welcome here whether I am here or not.” She wanted to say _treat him as the lord of my house, with as much honor and loyalty as you would give to me_, but nerves caught at her voice—even in Morozko’s arms, wrapped in his own finery, with the cool touch of his lips still burning on her throat and cheek, she couldn’t quite swallow the fear that it would be presumptuous.

“Welcome, gosudar,” the domovaya said, her voice a little stronger. “If you would care to put the lady down, I have honey cakes and porridge.”

“And you needn’t even steal them,” Morozko murmured in Vasya’s ear, and he lowered her to the ground with the same ease as when he had scooped her up.

Vasya had been afraid, in a scattered and fretful sort of way, that having Morozko in the house by the lake would seem as strange and out of joint as imagining him in the great kitchen in Lesnaya Zemlya. It was impossible to picture him beside the oven there, beside Alyosha and Kolya and Irina—even like this, nearly-mortal and teasing, he was far too much himself to ever fit neatly into her childhood home. But he sat on one of the two stools near the oven, and Vasya sat beside him, still draped in his blue cloak, and he seemed nearly as well suited as he was to his own home in the fir grove. The embers from the oven cast a warmer light over him that softened the wintry pallor of his skin and the sharpness of his bones, and when Vasya handed him a honey cake, he broke it open without concern for getting the sweetness on his skin.

The honey cake warmed Vasya’s fingers—what had been a treat when she was a child was common fare now, but she still loved the little cakes for their familiarity. The domovaya, in the first days after Vasya’s return to the lake, had worried about her, behind the layer of irritation she often preferred to hide behind. Vasya had been quiet and slow, as if still favoring the wounds that Morozko had healed for her, that first night in his home. She had cried out often in nightmares, and had once even slept outside with the horses, so that she might be near Solovey and let the steady warmth of his side drive out the worst of her fear. The domovaya had only had limited supplies, as far as food and comfort went, and Vasya had forced herself to eat, but she had given most of her porridge to Solovey every morning and often forgot to eat at midday and picked at her dinner.

It had been Ded Grib who finally wheedled a leshy into bringing a beehive, complete but thankfully devoid of bees, to the house by the lake. Vasya had accepted it into her hands with blank confusion, and handed it to the domovaya without a fight when the little hearth-spirit demanded it. That night, there had been honey cakes, and Vasya ate three. 

After that, there were honey cakes every day until the last of the beehive’s bounty was gone, and by then Vasya had stopped weeping as much for her brother and had even slept through the night once without waking. When the beehive ran out, the domovaya had spoken to the dvorovoi, and the dvorovoi had spoken to the vazila, and the vazila had spoken to Solovey, and Solovey, finally, had spoken to Vasya, in his high-handed cheerful way, and they had gone out to find more honey, so that there might be cakes again.

Morozko ate neatly, his hands so cold that the crumbs could not stick to him the way they clung to Vasya, and she studied him without any particular sense of shame while he pressed a bowl of porridge into her hands. He let her look her fill without complaint and asked her about the horses while she asked him about Rus’. He told her about Dmitrii Ivanovich rebuilding in the cities and the boyars distributing goods for the winter—a hard winter, after the battle, but not catastrophic. The chyerti would care for their own, and the Church had kept its word to Vasya. The hunting of witches had ceased, and chyerti were beginning to remember what it was to be remembered.

The winter-king told her only of the good, and she knew that he kept the rest back, and was grateful.

“I hope Alyosha and Kolya remember the chyerti at home,” Vasya said around her thumb, as she thoughtfully licked the last crumb from it. “It takes so long for news to reach them, and it has been—years, since I was there to feed the domovoi and the rusalka.”

“You could go there,” Morozko offered, and Vasya hesitated. “Your bond to your brothers is strong. It would see you safely through Midnight, to them, or to your sister. And this place is yours now. You will always be able to find it.”

“I could,” Vasya agreed slowly, trying to imagine how that reunion would proceed. “If they even let me come back.” She ruffled her fingers through her short hair a bit regretfully—even beginning to grow out in her idyll by the lake, it was still boyishly short, and she could picture Alyosha and Kolya’s well-bred dismay at the sight. To say nothing of her near-miss with being burned as a witch, or her presence in battle, or her complete failure to fulfill the duties of a noble-born maiden. 

Vasya smiled a little, ruefully, and said, “Would you go with me, if I went back to Lesnaya Zemlya and faced my brothers’ disappointment?”

“As long as you go with snow still on the ground and wish to have me.” Vasya blinked at him, taken aback at the forthright answer—no trace of earnest sincerity or affectionate overstatement, but as matter-of-fact as any scholar. Morozko’s lips quirked into a wry smile at her expression and he said, “You saved me from my brother’s curse, and I walked under the midsummer sun for you. Going to the cold north to be the object of disapproval for your family will not be a challenge.”

“You would meet with them?” Vasya’s heart rose as if buoyed on a sudden inward tide. It was unlikely, to say the least, that her family would ever be on good terms with Morozko—a swift pang of longing for Sasha’s good sense made her swallow—but they were her family. The idea of simply vanishing from their lives into the winter forest made something sad and sour curl in her belly.

“If you wish.” Morozko hesitated for a moment. “It will not…make it easier.”

“No,” Vasya said dryly. “Unfortunately, my days of easy conversations with anyone but you seem to be over. But you are important to me, and….” It was her turn to hesitate. “And I promised that I would come back.”

“Then we will go back,” Morozko said simply.

Vasya watched him, letting out a breath and feeling an upswell of fondness that threatened to crush her ribs with the force of it. He was the proud fierce king of winter now, still young and wild with the rise of his season even if he wasn’t the lord of Midwinter she had met in Midnight, and even in front of the oven he wore unmelted snow still in his black hair and the killing strength of the blizzard in his bright eyes, and he was looking at her without a trace of untruth in his face. She had said that she wanted her family to know him, and he had agreed, without concern or even consideration, and she loved him for being such a contradiction.

“Come with me,” Vasya said—it was hopeless to play coy, she decided, when Morozko knew her so well to be her own direct self. Instead she stood from her stool and held out her hand, still draped in his cloak, and made herself meet his eyes. Part of her, the well-schooled boyar’s daughter who had never quite faded away, wanted to cast her eyes toward the ground, properly demure, and quailed at the idea of so forthrightly inviting him to her bed. 

Morozko smiled and took her hand, and the protesting part of Vasya was quietly smothered into silence. She drew him after her, and behind them, the domovaya banked up the oven fire.

* * *

It was later—Vasya wasn’t sure how much later and couldn’t entirely bring herself to care—that she was resting her chin on her folded arms, propped comfortably on Morozko’s chest. His cloak lay warm and heavy over her, and by extension him, and he was drawing recursive patterns of curls within curls on her back. Frost feathering, Vasya realized after a moment of paying attention. No ice followed his fingertips, but the branching curves matched the look of frost on still water. It made her smile, lazy with satisfaction, and he arched an eyebrow at her, inquisitive.

“Can you change your face at will?” she asked instead of admitting her thoughts. If she pointed it out, he might stop, and the light touch was so pleasant, idle affection as if it put him at ease just to be touching her, that she wanted to enjoy it as long as possible. “This--” she reached out to finger the bold edge of his jaw, skating up to his cheekbone and brow “—is your winter face. Can you change it to yourself at Midwinter, or yourself in black, or does it just happen?”

Morozko tipped his face into her seeking fingers, thoughtful. “It depends. I am what I need to be, when I need to be it. I could not take the dead as the Lord of Midwinter, any more than my summer self could bring the first snowfall. But like this, when I am myself and nothing more, I could be whichever self you prefer.”

“I prefer all of them,” Vasya said stoutly. Then she smiled, catching her tongue between her teeth teasingly, and said, “But, I’ve never kissed you in black.”

“You are incomprehensible.” Morozko shook his head at her, pressing a kiss to her fingertips. But then he raised his hand to pass it over his own face, and when it was gone and Vasya could see him again, he was his older self, the self who took the dead. 

At such close quarters, she could see differences she had never noticed before. This older face—Karachun, Vasya thought as she reached out curiously to rest her fingers on his cheek—was graver, but it was more than that. His ancient colorless eyes were more deeply set, his face almost gaunt under her touch, and though his mouth was the same, still as expressive as ever, it rested in a faint frown rather than his familiar royally calm expression. The hollow beneath the corner of his jaw was darker, the wing of his collarbone more pronounced, even the bones in the wrist and hand that touched Vasya’s own arm were more visible. It should have made him look delicate, but instead it was like looking at an impossibly old birch tree—slim and ancient and strong.

He—Morozko, Karachun, whichever he was like this—let her finish her investigation with the interminable patience of death.

“This is your kindest face,” Vasya decided after a moment. His other faces, wild Midwinter and proud Frost and even the shadow of himself she had seen in the summer heat, were all beautiful, all beloved, but none of them had the calm, steady regard of Karachun’s eternal eyes. Winter was temporary and often temperamental, but death came for everyone with the same universal mercy, and that even-handed serenity was written into every line and edge of his face.

“I believe you may be the only person in the world with that opinion.” His voice was different, too, slower and more considered, with an odd note that spoke to an accent much, much older than the Rus’ he ruled.

Vasya traced her fingertip over his lips, and then she lifted her chin proudly and said, “I believe I may be the only person who has ever looked long enough at all your faces to have an opinion one way or another, winter-king.” Then she bent and kissed him, kissed the grave lips and felt the ancient hands stroke up her spine.

When she parted, he was smiling at her—it was fainter on this face, a face not made for smiling, but still familiar. “Will you be assigning opinions to all my faces, _vedma_?” he asked, and passed a hand over his features again. It left the Lord of Midwinter behind, young and wild, and Vasya grinned.

“This,” she said, swooping down to kiss him again, swift and teasing, “is your fiercest face. Your proudest.” Morozko caught Vasya around her waist and flipped her effortlessly, so that she was pinned to the furs underneath them. She caught a shout of laughter before it could escape and broke down into giggles instead as he kissed her throat, her shoulders, the broad span of his hand skating over her ribs and belly. “You’re lucky that this face is a king,” she told him, a little breathless. “Kings are allowed to be arrogant.”

Morozko kissed her lips, once, twice, until she tangled her hands into his long black hair and clung to the cool touch of his skin. “You are a danger,” he murmured into the space between them. Then he kissed her again, slower, and leaned back to ask, “Do you have a favorite?” The question was unselfconscious, without a trace of insecurity for the sake of one self over the others, and Vasya was so taken aback that the answer slipped from her lips before she could think twice.

“No.” Morozko arched an eyebrow at her, leaning over her with one hand resting cool and familiar over the base of her ribs. “Or rather, yes,” Vasya revised. “But my favorite face is always the one looking at me. I like Frost’s serious look and Midwinter’s wildness and Karachun’s patience. I like the strength of your midsummer self, when you’re doing impossible things. I like the way you look at me like this,” she took a breath to make his hand slide on her skin, and smiled when his eyes darkened, “and I like the way you hold me in black, and I liked the way you kissed me this morning. I don’t see why I should have to choose.”

Morozko let out a breath that frosted on her eyelashes and made her shiver, and then kissed her again. He was his winter self again when he leaned back, the face he had worn when he came to the lake that morning, the face he had worn when she first met him in the forest outside her home.

“You do not need to choose, Zimnyaya Koroleva,” he said. That won another shudder, deeper and truer than the brief cold wind—_winter-queen_, he called her, the name that the Midnight village had shouted to her as she stood at his side. Out of all the names she had gained, that wore the most weight and struck the hardest. “All of my faces are yours.”

“Good,” Vasya said. “Kiss me again, winter-king.”

Morozko bent his head and obeyed.

**Author's Note:**

> If you want to talk to me about these books, PLEASE come into my inbox on [Tumblr](https://words-writ-in-starlight.tumblr.com/) so that I can turn your completely innocent question into an unreasonably long response.


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